1999-06-12 04:00:00 PDT Los Angeles -- Racial segregation in U.S. public schools is accelerating, with the trend particularly notable among Latinos in California and elsewhere in the Southwest.

As a result, 45 years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregation, minority students are increasingly likely to attend class in racial isolation and under "profoundly unequal" conditions, a study to be released Monday finds.

At the same time, the effect of those conditions on students' futures is being magnified by state policies -- such as California's, which put a premium on test scores, high school graduation tests, less remedial education and the end of affirmative action for college admission.

Nationwide, nearly 70 percent of African American students and 75 percent of Latino students attend predominantly minority schools, according to the report, based on 1997 data, from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. More than one-third of the students in each group are in schools where 90 percent or more of their classmates are minorities. Meanwhile, the average white student is enrolled in a school where more than eight in 10 of his or her classmates also are white.

In California, racial isolation is even greater, with more than 40 percent of Latino students and 35 percent of African American students attending schools that are 90 percent or more minority. Authors of the report said the state is approaching the "hypersegregation" that has characterized schooling in the Northeast.

One of the most intriguing trends in the federal enrollment data analyzed by the researchers is the increasing segregation of schools in suburbs.

In large metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, 30 percent of Latinos and 20 percent of African Americans are enrolled in suburban schools. Yet, even in the suburbs, the average Latino or African American attends a school that is 60 percent or more minority.

Gary Orfield, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, said educators could take a regional approach to such enrollment trends and help suburbs "avoid the sorry experiences of the intense segregation of the inner cities."

Desegregation of city schools is no longer feasible, he said. "But there's lots of places where it is and it's important to think about it."

Some observers say the supporters of desegregation, among whom Orfield has long been one of the most well-known and articulate, want schools to undertake the almost hopeless task of stopping or reversing the effects of immigration, economics and housing patterns.

Orfield "wants us to believe that the schools are doing this deliberately," said William Arthur Valentine Clark, a University of California at Los Angeles professor of geography. "In fact . . . you've got a huge increase in the young Latino population, so how is it segregation if they're all going to school together. Whites are an aging population and they have opted out of the schools, if they can afford it."

"Is it necessary to have a white child and a Latino child and a black child sitting next to each other to deal with the basic educational issues?" asked Clark, author of a new book on immigration called "The California Cauldron: Immigration and the Fortunes of Local Communities."

But Orfield and others argue that the trends toward resegregation must be reversed because along with racial isolation, such schools often have concentrations of poverty.